Knife Party at the Hotel Europa

by Mark Anthony Jarman

  This young woman’s brown nipples are extremely thin and long, like tiny twigs, where a bird might perch. Now, would milk squirt a greater distance from such narrow nipples? A question of physics, pressure. And my cousin’s nipples so tiny and pale pink glimpsed once in a hotel room, in repressed memory. Forget that image.

  Cobalt Girl dances with Santino, dances with elbows close to her waist, hands and wrists outward as she shimmies, almost the Twist. I would like to start a new dance craze. Do the Mashed Potato. Do the Staple Gun, do the Lazy Lawyer, do the Dee-vor-cee dividing his assets and shekels.

  Santino grins at me, Santino whispers in her ear and they dance some more and then they stop.

  “You must watch, my new friends,” says Santino. “In an American movie we saw a dancer do this.”

  The other, is his name Pepini? Penino? My brain is not to be relied on. Where is my drink.

  Santino takes one paper match and with a pen-knife slices the middle of the match so that there is a narrow opening. Cobalt Girl takes the match from Santino and carefully places the opening of the one match to her breast so that the match grips her long nipple. Santino hands her another such match and then she lights them both, pointing each head up and away from her skin. Cobalt Girl dances proudly in front of us, shifting her hips and smiling at her party trick.

  She says something in Italian.

  “Do you see this in Canada?” Santino translates.

  “No.”

  “No, I thought not. Not in Canada, eh.”

  Is that an Italian “eh” or a Canadian “eh”?

  The stoned woman dances and moves her head side to side, she’s seen this sultry style of dancing on videos, she moves so that her hair swings, like a star on celluloid. I worry about the small flames hurting the skin of her breasts, but instead the burning matches cause her swinging hair to catch fire, perhaps a tad too much flammable hairspray or some weird gel.

  Eve points a finger like a gun, says, “That isn’t good.”

  Santino looks from us to Cobalt Girl, stops grinning and calmly throws his drink on her, so I pour the remainder of my beer over her burning hair. Others add their drinks. It is as if we are allowed to urinate on her. Cobalt Girl is crying, tears and drinks tracking down over her bare breasts and snuffed black matches, Cobalt Girl runs to the bathroom, hair smouldering like a volcano. It’s kind of sexy. Where is the volcano, I mean the washroom? Where am I?

  Sometimes when travelling I must look about and remind myself where I am, what new kingdom I gaze at. I like that feeling of being momentarily lost, of a brief gap, of having different eyes, new eyes upon gnarled trees and brightest scooter. I am near Naples on a scratchy pink couch and I am prying open a cold beer that is warm. Sometimes I feel like that dead Roman rat I saw beneath the trees. Sometimes I feel like a chocolate bar with too many bite marks. Sometimes I feel the world is a very beautiful white T-shirt.

  Another giant joint makes the rounds, strong and harsh behind my teeth. I feel instantly stoned or re-stoned, I’m not sure of the order, not used to this quality. Eve says that Mister Italy is back. By the door a teenager from the train is showing Santino and Mister Italy a knife with a beautiful handle the shade of dark honey, as if an ancient scorpion might be trapped there in amber. They admire the lovely knife.

  The woman with hair so recently on fire is laughing again, though her hair looks frizzily fucked up: she moves room to room laughing, smoking up from a tiny bag of weed.

  She says to me in Italian, “After that ordeal I am very thirsty, tell me, do you have birra?”

  “Yes,” I say. “I’m happy to share.”

  “That’s good you are happy with me.” Cobalt Girl smiles, puts on a porkpie hat, just an old-fashioned girl who likes the traditional drugs. It may simply be the fine dope, but her laughing makes me laugh, I like her.

  I’m not happy (especially about Natasha), but I know I can be happy again. I know it is there, but what port of call, what passport, what bright map on my wall, what coast and sea? I know a port exists, know it is close. When I find it I will write a book called Duct Tape for the Soul and it will sell gazillions.

  “Thank you for the birra.”

  “Prego. De nada.” Or is that Spanish? I get the words mixed up, think I’m in Spain. Pliny was in Spain. I wonder if Cobalt Girl was with the group kicking out the train window. She mimes tossing beer on her hair. Sì, sì. She mimes a moonwalk. Michael Jackson! Yes! I get it now. His hair caught fire too!

  The kitchen group fights as if one pulsating organism. Perché vendichi su di me l’offesa che ti ha fatto un altro? Why are you taking revenge on me for someone else’s offence? It sounds too Sicilian for words. Why are they all so fucking loud?

  The white doorway pours noise into the living room; young males run out and males run into the kitchen talking in tongues, raucous Italian voices producing a rapid clatter of words, like a rock beach rolling in brisk surf.

  Mamma mia, che rabbia mi fai! How you enrage me!

  Mi trattengo dal dire quello che penso solo per buona educa zione. I refrain from saying what I think only because of my good upbringing.

  Santino has a silver pen, or is it the knife? What is he saying to Mister Italy?

  Hands waving. To give a lesson!

  In the kitchen they shove each other, Naples’s surly suburban dancers pushing and fighting, two sides, three sides, one room of the party becoming a minor brawl. A young woman says something and is knocked over and kicked by the older neighbour and she crawls the floor like a shouting crocodile. Maybe this is normal (the word normative pops into my head from Sociology 100, hi Professor Gee), I can’t tell as there is so much noise in Italy, so much life, so many scooter horns beeping threats and throats calling out la dolce vita, vim and vengeance.

  During the day they shout at me at the grocery cashier, at the café, in the street, from the kitchen; it’s a hectoring country, it’s almost comic to be shouted at so much. Someone shouts dargli una lezione, give him a lesson, a leg for a leg. Which leg do they mean? Mister Italy’s leg? Staple Gun Guy the neighbour’s leg?

  I start to stand up, but the stoned woman laughs and pulls me down into her lap and smoky smell. She says her name is Maria and she’s friendly and warm, she’s Italian! From this odd perspective I have a sideways view of the crowded kitchen.

  Santino bends low, his face looking sleepy as he swings his arm in a resigned arc that ends with a knife driven into the neighbour’s thigh. Blood gushes immediately at the base of the knife, as if Santino struck an oil well, and in the room a general hiss of understanding and pity and then more voices, more shouting, more gesturing. His leg, his blood-splattered denim, blood falls from him, blood on the floor.

  I stand up too fast and feel pressure in my brow; my brain is collapsing, back to the baboon, back to the apes. Maria props me up as Santino runs out of the crowd like a hunched assassin. Mister Italy and others follow him out the door in a more assured manner. Staple Gun Guy looks at his liquid leg. The knife is gone from his leg. Who removed the knife?

  Maybe the assailant thought a jab to the leg was not dangerous, but how the blood wells, how it pours from the man, blood born in the kitchen, he can’t stop the blood freed from tiny culverts and tunnels. The neighbour’s blood is dark, but glistens. Blood polka dots around the kitchen, dots the size of coins, red coins painting the canvas so quickly. Maria the stoned woman stares at Staple Gun Guy. It’s like opera. How can there be so much blood draining from one cut? The eye can’t understand the image it seizes (I smote him thus).

  The neighbour looks down at his leg, nature staring back. No more chronic for you, no more nose candy. A young woman holds a tea towel to the gushing leg. “It won’t stop!” she cries.

  The knife must have met an artery, severed an artery, we meet in a rented room of blood, blood so scarlet on their white floor and dark rug and a trail as he heads to the door, to another country. Don’t move, they say, but the neighbour wishes to go home with his staple gun. It�
��s my party and I’ll die if I want to.

  He passes by and my cousin Eve stares as if a monster is walking past on a moor (amore!). The monster passes the armchair the shape and colour of an ancient tombstone and the coffee table with my bottles and the small baggie of cocaine under the blue light bulb. Eve took a first-aid course, says he shouldn’t walk if he’s bleeding like that, he should really stay still.

  The neighbour makes it to the door, but falls in the hall like a Doric column. He has bled out. Now the kitchen empties, groups pushing and shoving, not to fight, but to exit. Partygoers nimbly leap his body and flee like goats down the long hall. An older woman opens her apartment door to peer out at the raucous stampede, the mad stomping hurdle race. Spying blood and a body, the woman dials her small silver phone, whispers, Madonna save us.

  A few linger in the living room; either they didn’t do it or they live here; until this second I hadn’t thought of someone living here. A home. It was just a party. One well-dressed man stops, calmly checks the body on the stained carpet.

  “E morto,” he states as if saying the weather is inclement.

  Maria the stoned woman takes the staple gun and leaves.

  Eve says, “Let’s go. They called the police.”

  “What about an ambulance?”

  “The polizia will handle it. We have to leave.”

  “My beer.”

  “Forget your fucking beer!”

  I grab the tiny bag of coke and step over the stained carpet and body in the liminal doorway. Why did I ever walk up this narrow hall? Morto, blood flees a human so quickly and all of us drain the rooms so quickly and down the crowded stairs, slim bodies draped in black suits and pants, knees and arms moving jerkily in black-crow angles against sharp white stucco, stucco where you cut your elbow and bleed if you touch the wall.

  On the street we run past the World War Two tanks again, run like pale ghosts past the same Chinese factory and radioactive canal water and a distant figure throwing something, a tiny splash in the silver canal, perhaps a stolen phone or the knife from the neighbour’s leg.

  Eve and I turn a corner and there are two policemen standing in pretty leather boots and jodhpurs.

  Oh fuck, I think. We attempt to impersonate people walking calmly, but how? I have forgotten the details of calm, I should have taken notes during a calm time knowing this would happen down the line.

  One policeman hugs a middle-aged woman who is crying non-stop, she can’t stop. The policeman holds up a device for her to breathe into. Is it a puffer to help her breathe or to measure alcohol in her system? No idea. The policeman tells her to stop struggling or she can be charged. She grips the policeman’s face in her hands, chants something into his face. He asks her to stop, but she won’t remove her hands from his face.

  My cousin whispers a rough translation: “I’m putting my fifty-year-old hands in your face if I feel like it. You’re half my age, you little fucking dick.”

  Perhaps, as I’ve told my cousin and Tamika, I’m invisible. The police don’t care about us as they are busy loosening her hands from his face. Men in soccer shirts outside a social club watch my cousin and me come up the sidewalk. Word cannot have spread of the nearby party.

  “Scusi,” says my cousin. “Train? Treno? Stazione?” Her Italian is better than mine.

  They point down the boulevard toward the sea. “Gira a sinistra.”

  “Left,” I say. I know that sinister means left and enjoy that word, sinistra. The left hand is unlucky.

  “Grazie,” says my cousin, “grazie.”

  “First you come drink with us,” the man says.

  “Sorry, we must go.”

  “No. One drink! To life! One drink!”

  “Numero di telefono?” another asks hopefully.

  “No, no,” says my pretty cousin, “in Italy I have no phone.”

  “Andate a piedi?”

  “Sì, we’re walking.”

  “A nice walk,” says one and grabs her backside. “If that was my wife…”

  “That’s my ass!” I yell. Why did I say that?

  “Fuck off,” she yells.

  “To life!” they yell. We’re way down the block, I think that’s what they yell.

  We’re running, we run blocks to the train station and I’m gasping; I can ride a clunker bike all day, but I’m not used to running. The station ticket window is empty, no one is in charge, which is fine by me. I’ve been travelling on an expired pass that also allows me into art galleries and museums around Naples. I’ll pay a fine, I’m just glad to be on board. Now if the train will just move. I can’t sit. Move, move.

  I don’t care where the train goes, I just don’t want to be around if the polizia are looking for witnesses or a scapegoat for the knifing, don’t want to be a person of interest. Father Silas’s art school is not officially recognized in Italy. Move!

  My cousin asks, “Are we supposed to carry our passports? Mine’s at the hotel.”

  “Any blood on us?”

  “No one knows we were there.”

  We check our clothes for blood splatters anyway, our hands.

  “Check the bottom of my shoes.”

  Did we walk in blood? And that blood-sodden tea towel.

  “Maybe the guy’s okay.”

  “I’d say he was pretty well gone.” Gone west. We sit for what seems like humming hours, then our train betrays that buzzy feeling just before movement begins, that pre-coital imminence, and we sail forward in a silent sway of deliverance.

  I remember a funeral for a good friend on the west coast, a lively giant of a man, very well liked. I’ve never heard so many people say, He was my best friend. I was getting jealous. At the open coffin funeral we sat in solemn pews waiting for the sad service to start and instead the Steppenwolf song “Born to be Wild” roared to life, loud as hell.

  Everyone in the funeral chapel laughed; he would have liked that, he laughed a lot. But I saw his big face blank in the coffin and his combed beard and thought, Yes, he is spent, he is dead, he is missing from his own face. Some force that was him no longer there (Elvis has left the apartment building). Maybe that’s why we have open casket funerals or a wake with the body right in your parlour, so you know, really feel the knowledge physically and don’t wait for him to show up at your door or expect to see your old friend for a pint in Swans pub. E morto. You must know.

  Our night train will swallow us, will travel all the way to Sorrento. The swallows return. Now, is that Sorrento or Capistrano? A leg with a knife severing a major artery. No more stoned young women for the neighbour with the staple gun. Come back. The dead hand, like the men on the crowded subway in Rome leaving their hand low to grope women, mortua manus. See the wonders of the ancient world!

  “Did you even see who stabbed him?”

  I decide to lie. “No, no, I just saw legs and a blade swinging.” And all that blood that should stay inside.

  “I just want to be back at the hotel. Be back home.”

  “We’ll be back soon enough.”

  She looks so forlorn, whereas I feel immense relief that the train is shunting us away. I show my cousin the stolen baggie.

  “You took that from the dead guy? Why?” She looks around the train. “Are you fucking crazy?”

  “I had some years ago and really liked it, but I could never afford it.”

  “Fuck! What if we get stopped?”

  “I’ll get rid of it.”

  “They’d see you tossing it.”

  My Irish cousins have an expression when something is of little use: like throwing water on a dead rat. I realize it’s my birthday and I missed it wandering this beautiful rat’s nest on a bay. My birthday present.

  “I don’t know. It was sitting there. I wanted to try some again. I’ll hide it in my sock.”

  We’ll be okay. The familiar train will deliver us back to chapels and chipped frescoes and Fabergé eggs and our whining art group. The aged conductor always so calm in the heat and sweat of day and th
e ennui of night. Our conductor possesses natural dignity. He does not bring up the idea of tickets. I am glad he runs the train. His childhood bride waits at home; this I am sure of. She is plumper than when they met at the dance and the world was shot in black and white.

  The calm conductor and his bride make me think about marriage. Marriage is success, marriage is failure, marriage is music, a ride, marriage is a train with windows. Every room is a train with windows, every office and every head is a train with windows, everything in the world is a train with windows.

  The question is, Do you kick out the windows or do you sit politely and hope for the uniformed conductor? Does our conductor live with his wife in smouldering Naples or far out on the flank of the famous volcano? Does Maria the stoned Cobalt Woman live on the volcano? She was nice to me and then ran.

  A man very near answers his phone: “Pronto?!” His voice sounds so hopeful in my ear, rising sharply at the end of the fast word: pron-TO!! But his phone will not agree to work.

  “I’m on the train,” he shouts. “I might lose you.”

  The dead man went pale as we lost him, as we watched, no more phone calls for him. In the mountain tunnels this time no one kicks out the glass. There is no one Italy, there is a vast collection of Italys, but this Italy tonight is sombre, in black, this Italy is sixteen coaches long, our train moving beside the sea, our train on top of the rolling sea.

  Dories on painters drift, reach the end of the rope, pale boats wobbling between stars under water, submerged light the shape of lost milky amphoras, yachts and white moving lights on water and light under the sea and then I see the spotlights touching the church and City Hall, where I bought a handsome watch from a flea market table.

  Ah, I recognize where we are now. Next stop. I’m becoming an old hand, an expert.

  “Prossima fermata,” I say very slowly to my cousin, my best singsong Italian accent, drawing out the pleasing words as I try them on. “Next stop is ours. How are you doing?”